Tali Green
When you talk to Lisa Borsook, you might be forgiven for feeling a bit…slow. Her career timeline almost defies arithmetic – she was admitted to U of T Law at 19, done with law school and working by 21, and a WeirFoulds partner by 26. Perhaps the least surprising thing, then, is that Borsook was a wife and a mother of two when she became one of the first female managing partners of a major Bay Street law firm. Our conversation started with a frank discussion of women’s roles in the legal profession, and then took a turn for the more unisex topic of why firms really hire students.
Helping women thrive in private practice
When she’s not managing law firms or cooking her family’s daily sit-down dinner, Borsook strives to find a way to help other women in private practice, because, as she says, “any firm that focuses only on the number of hours a lawyer sits in his or her seat is going to work to the detriment of women.”
Instead of the typical “year of call” process to partnership, her firm evaluates its lawyers based on a process called benchmarking. It establishes three career stages which, once accomplished, are supposed to make all of its lawyers eligible for partnership. “Even if it takes women 10 years to get to partnership, that’s fine. You don’t have to think that because you hit year 7, or whatever your firm’s pace is, and you didn’t make partner, that you’re out of the loop and you’re never going to make it.”
Besides untying partnership from year-of-call, Borsook encourages associates to focus on adding to a firm’s bottom line – and not just their own timesheets. “There is probably a list of 20 different ways that you can contribute to the profitability of a firm – only one of which is billing a lot of hours. You can also do it by ‘making rain’ – by working on existing client relationships and developing them further,” she proposes.
Why women should stay at work
Borsook’s goal may be to reverse the trend of women leaving private practice to make more time for their families, but how relevant is career advice from someone who made partner at an age when most of today’s students are just graduating law school? What’s a recent law grad to do when her career and family ambitions seem to demand immediate attention at the same exact time? Borsook is sympathetic, and she supports modifying one’s career path depending on life’s demands. But she thinks that entirely stepping off that path for the sake of family is a total mistake: “Defining your career path and accepting that it’s going to take this long or that long before you do this or that – these are choices that I think that women should be making. The part I don’t get is to just resile from it all together. That’s a choice I have trouble with.”
While we can hear Sandbergian undertones, Borsook’s lean-in angle is designed to prevent toppling over. But still – why the zealous encouragement of spending motherhood at the office? “I have always played the long game,” Borsook explains. “The short game is thinking about where you want to be a year from now and organizing your life around that. In the long game, you might have kids who are demanding, a partner who can no longer support you, or a loved one who is ill and needs your support.” So she suggests that a young lawyer with a young family should ask him or herself: “how do I want my life to look 10 years from now regardless of what happens to me and how do I do the best that I can to ensure that there are no catastrophic consequences from which I cannot recover?”
Why firms really hire women…and students
We’ve been focusing on women’s career choices. But what do those choices look like from an employer’s perspective? Deep down, don’t firms just prefer to hire people who are less likely to take maternity leaves and/or rush home at 5pm? Borsook promises that firms do not hire women just to save face. “Not having women in private practice is a crazy thing to do,” she says, and “it is bad business.” As more and more women are choosing to become in-house counsel and assume other roles, the future decision makers are going to be women. “I believe that they are going to want to work with other women,” she says, “other women lawyers.”
Speaking of employees who put firms in the red, though, it looks like students top the list. “There are lots of ways in which, arguably, you could improve profitability – by not hiring women, by not hiring students, by not higher young associates,” Borsook imparts. “My clients today don’t want me to pay to train law students. They don’t want to pay me to train young associates.” Instead, she says, her clients might prefer that she just hire someone else’s fourth year lawyer “because they won’t feel that they are paying for their training.”
Genuinely shocked by the revelation that law student labour could be a sub-optimal expenditure, I wonder (out loud) why law students are hired at all. “I have had the privilege of working in a law firm,” Borsook explains, “that is prepared to sacrifice aspects of its profitability for what it considers to be a package of responsibilities to the larger community.” Those include responsibilities to the Law Society of Upper Canada to train students, and a responsibility to the larger community to perform work in ways that are not perfectly profitable.
But apparently they’re not just doing us a favour, either. “I would say that hiring students and associates is a matter of short term bottom line pain for great long term gain,” Borsook says. “When we have the opportunity to train young lawyers from the start, I like to think we end up with – this is a horrible way to put it – a better product.” Borsook finds that such “homemade” lawyers are more likely to understand the firm’s culture, respect its values, and be tested for “intelligence, thoughtfulness, creativity, endurance, and discipline.” A tall order from someone who definitely knows what it takes.
